Fitzgerald as Screenwriter: No Hollywood Ending

By CHARLES McGRATH

Published: April 22, 2004

In the summer of 1937, broke, in debt and trying desperately to dry out, F. Scott Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood, where he joined the legions of jerks with Underwoods, to paraphrase the studio chief Jack Warner's famous put-down of screenwriters.

Fitzgerald was part of what amounted to a literary exodus. Among the writers already there or soon to join him were Donald Ogden Stewart, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, S. J. Perelman, Nathanael West and the British novelists Anthony Powell and Aldous Huxley, all in search of easy money.

Fitzgerald stayed in Hollywood for two and a half years, longer than most literary writers stuck it out in those days, and he worked harder than many, toiling away on now-forgotten movies like ''A Yank at Oxford'' and ''Madame Curie.'' He produced what now appears to have been a mountain of manuscripts -- treatments, sketches, drafts, polishes, rewrites -- much of it in soft-penciled longhand.

Some 2,000 pages of this material, the largest cache of Fitzgerald manuscripts ever offered for sale, have just been acquired by the University of South Carolina, which on Tuesday announced that this new archive, called the Warner Brothers Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald Screenplays, will become part of the Matthew J. and Arlyn Bruccoli Collection at the university's Thomas Cooper Library in Columbia.

Mr. Bruccoli, a University of South Carolina scholar, is also a famous archivist and collector who has written or edited dozens of books about Fitzgerald, Hemingway and their generation. He bought the archive from a dealer, who obtained it from a former studio employee who does not want to be identified.

The importance of the archive, Mr. Bruccoli said in an interview, is that ''it corrects this distorted view of Fitzgerald's Hollywood years, the idea that he was just staggering around drunk all the time and not earning his salary.'' Unlike many screenwriters, Fitzgerald ''didn't just take the money and run,'' Mr. Bruccoli added.

''He took screenwriting very seriously,'' he continued, ''and it's heartbreaking to see how much effort he put into it.'' The new archive reveals, among other things, that Fitzgerald approached every screenplay as if it were a novel and often wrote long back stories for each of the characters before setting down a word of dialogue.

Fitzgerald had actually tried screenwriting twice before, during brief stints in 1927 and 1931, when he worked for Irving Thalberg (on whom he later modeled the character Monroe Stahr in ''The Last Tycoon''). But he did not accomplish much, and living large, he wound up spending more than he made. In 1937 he signed a six-month contract with MGM for $1,000 a week, which was later renewed for $1,250, a very nice paycheck in the Depression.

Fitzgerald lived modestly this time, renting an apartment in the Garden of Allah bungalow complex on Sunset Boulevard and turning up faithfully at his cubicle on the MGM lot, where he drank Coca-Cola by the case in a not entirely successful effort to stay off the hard stuff.

Sadly, most of his work was to no avail. Billy Wilder, Fitzgerald's friend and admirer in his Hollywood days, always thought the notion of turning him into a screenwriter was a little misguided. He once compared Fitzgerald to ''a great sculptor who is hired to do a plumbing job.''

''He did not know how to connect the pipes so the water could flow,'' he said.

As Wilder foresaw, Fitzgerald in the end had even worse luck in Hollywood than writers like William Faulkner and Raymond Chandler, who actually saw a movie or two of theirs be made and in something like the form in which they had written it. In his entire Hollywood career Fitzgerald picked up only a single screenwriting credit, for the 1938 film ''Three Comrades'' (starring Robert Taylor and Margaret Sullavan and based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque), and even that script was heavily rewritten by the producer, Joseph L. Mankiewicz.

Fitzgerald worked briefly and unsuccessfully as a rewrite man on a few other projects (including, for a disastrous week or so, ''Gone With the Wind,'' for which he was forbidden to use any words that did not appear in Margaret Mitchell's text). But after ''Three Comrades,'' his main MGM projects ended in failure. One, a movie called ''Infidelity,'' which was intended for Joan Crawford, was canceled because the Breen Office, which controlled standards for the movie industry, took a dim view of pictures about adultery.

Material in the new archive shows that Fitzgerald took this rejection hard. He first wrote a memo asking to be allowed to rewrite the plot ''in terms of thievery instead of adultery, and see if it doesn't offer itself to drama and also to a theme.'' A month and a half later he tried again, saying that he had ''arrived at some clear thinking'' about the movie and explaining that to clear his mind he had changed his ''mental picture of the casting.'' He said as soon as he imagined Myrna Loy as the lead, with Clark Gable as the husband and Robert Taylor the sweetheart, ''immediately the whole thing brightened for me.''